Miguel
Zenón has become one of jazz's most original thinkers. Today, at the age of 37,
he's one of the best-known alto saxophonists in jazz. The quartet he leads has
been working together for more than ten years, building its ensemble coherence
on stages all over the world. But Zenón's more than a great musician and
bandleader.
One of
only a handful of jazz musicians to be chosen for the coveted MacArthur
fellowships (in 2008), he's at the forefront of a new movement that in recent
years has brought the composer to a new prominence in jazz. But beyond his
facility at writing and playing music, there is a great intellectual subject at
the center of Miguel Zenón's artistic world: the complexity of Puerto Rican
culture.
Beginning
with his third album as a leader, Jíbaro (2005), and continuing with Esta Plena
(2009) and Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (2011) (both
Grammy-nominated), and Oye!!! Live In Puerto Rico (2013), Miguel Zenón has
created a series of thoughtfully framed works that interpret different facets
of Puerto Rican culture. Zenón's Puerto Rico is a bit like Gabriel García
Márquez's Colombia or Gilberto Gil's Brazil: the highly focused center of an
imaginative universe that looks to the world while being rooted at home. It
serves a springboard for his personal style: no one else's Puerto Rico - and no
one else's jazz - sounds like Miguel Zenón's.
Identities
Are Changeable, Zenón's powerful new composition, is a song cycle for large
ensemble, with his longtime quartet (Luis Perdomo, piano; Hans Glawischnig,
bass; Henry Cole, drums) at the center, incorporating recorded voices from a
series of interviews conducted by Zenón. Commissioned as a multi-media work by
Montclair State University's Peak Performances series, it has a multi-media
element with audio and video footage from the interviews, complemented by a
video installation created by artist David Dempewolf. It's been performed at
such prestigious venues as the New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall in
Boston, The SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, and Zankel Hall in the Carnegie
Hall complex in New York City.
The
album version of Identities Are Changeable is a labor of love, produced by
Miguel Zenón without commercial backing. It will be released November 4, 2014
as only the second title on his personal label, Miel Music.
I think
more and more people are realizing
that you
can be more than one cultural self
at the
same time,
and
you're at the crossings of those.
Rather
than being just squarely in one,
you'll
be at the crossings.
-- Juan
Flores
The core
of Identities Are Changeable is a series of English-language interviews Miguel
Zenón conducted with seven New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent. His initial
impetus for the project came from reading The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño
Tales of Learning and Turning, a book by cultural theorist Juan Flores based on
interviews with Puerto Ricans who had returned to the island after living on
the mainland. Zenón turned the tables and interviewed Flores, whose insightful
commentary grounds Zenón's finished work.
Other
interviewees who weave in and out of the musical texture are Miguel Zenón's
sister Patricia Zenón; the young musicians Luqués Curtis and Camilo Molina;
actress Sonia Manzano; poet Bonafide Rojas; and family friend Alex Rodríguez.
This is speech as music: their recorded voices, speaking off-the-cuff in their
own surroundings with the sound of the city around them, tell the story.
Writing about it in The Wall Street Journal, jazz journalist Larry Blumenfeld
quoted Zenón:
"I
asked pretty much the same things to everyone," [Zenón] said, "the
essential question being 'What does it mean to be Puerto Rican?'" As Mr.
Zenón analyzed his footage, themes emerged: Do you speak English or Spanish?
How is tradition passed on?
Zenón
identified key excerpts from the interviews and grouped them into six
thematically related clusters: national identity, home, blackness, language,
the next generation, and music. As he began writing instrumental music to
support the voices, those clusters became six fully elaborated musical
movements, plus an intro and outro, making for a 75-minute work of symphonic
dimensions.
I always
thought I was the blackest Puerto Rican.
Because
I was a Black Panther
before I
was a Young Lord,
because
I liked Hendrix
before I
liked Hector Lavoe.
--
Bonafide Rojas
Identities
Are Changeable showcases Miguel Zenón's most ambitious instrumental writing
yet. It's scored for a 16-piece large ensemble, consisting of Zenón's working
quartet supplemented by five saxes, four trumpets, and three trombones.
If you
think you already know what that sounds like, think again: though this
pulsating, percolating music is intensely rhythmic, it's not achieved through
the now traditional mambo-style section writing. It's still Latin, and it's
still jazz, but this sonority - Zenón's first big-band score - presents a
different kind of compositional and orchestrational challenge, and a different
kind of polyrhythm. It's more like modern symphonic writing, with layered
multiple meters that give new meaning to the term "harmonic rhythm"
as they create a translucent texture.
Zenón
explains: "all of the compositions explore the idea of multiple rhythmic
structures coexisting with each other (e.g., 5 against 7, 3 against 2, 5
against 3)." Drummer Henry Cole has his hands (and feet) full holding down
the simultaneous time streams, as does Zenón when he conducts the group live.
The players are a selected elite team - hear John Ellis's tenor solo on
"Same Fight," or Tim Albright's trombone feature on "First Language."
There's no way to convey in words the impact of the orchestral effects, but
reviewing the Zankel Hall performance for The New York Times, Ben Ratliff
writes:
"[The]
sound and language didn't directly suggest traditional Puerto Rican music or
traditional jazz. Its rhythm was phrased almost completely in stacked or odd
meter, with parts of the band shifting into double or half time, and Mr.
Zenón's saxophone darting around the chord changes or resting on top, in long
tones.
There
was drama and momentum in the music's developing harmonic movement; at times a
shift to a new chord felt like an event. All the music was deeply hybridized
and original, complex but clear."
It's all
at the service of Zenón's relentless curiosity, as he writes in the album's
liner notes:
When I
first came into contact with Puerto Rican communities in this country, I was
shocked to meet second and third generation Puerto Ricans who were as connected
to the traditions of their parents/grandparents and as proud to be Puerto Rican
as the people I knew back home. Where
was this sense of pride coming from? What did they consider their first
language? Their home? What did it mean to them to be Puerto Rican? What are the
elements that help us shape our national identity?
If the
music doesn't directly answer these questions, it provides a way into thinking
about them. Like Zenón's other music, it's about an entire society, but it's
deeply personal.
TRACK
LISTING
1. ¿De
Dónde Vienes? (Overture) (4:26)
2. Identities are Changeable (11:47)
3. My
Home (11:25)
4. Same Fight (12:25)
5. First Language (12:29)
6.
Second Generation Lullaby (11:20)
7. Through Culture and Tradition (10:30)
8. ¿De
Dónde Vienes? (Outro) (1:20)
PERSONNEL
Miguel
Zenón Quartet: Miguel Zenón, alto saxophone / Luis Perdomo, piano / Hans
Glawischnig, bass / Henry Cole, drums.
Identities
Big Band: Will Vinson, Michael Thomas, alto saxophones / Samir Zarif, John
Ellis (solo on "Same Fight"), tenor saxophones / Chris Cheek,
baritone saxophone / Mat Jodrel, Michael Rodriguez, Alex Norris, Jonathan
Powell, trumpets / Ryan Keberle, Alan Ferber, Tim Albright (solo on "First
Language"), trombones.
Multiple
Grammy nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow Miguel Zenón is one of a
select group of musicians who have masterfully balanced and blended the often
contradictory poles of innovation and tradition. Widely considered one of the
most groundbreaking and influential saxophonists of his generation, he has also
developed a unique voice as a composer and as a conceptualist, concentrating
his efforts on perfecting a fine mix between Latin American folkloric music and
jazz. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Zenón has released eight
recordings as a leader, including Oye!!! Live in Puerto Rico (2013), Rayuela
(2012) and the Grammy nominated Alma Adentro (2011). As a sideman he has worked
with jazz luminaries such as The SFJAZZ Collective, Charlie Haden, David
Sánchez, The Mingus Big Band, Bobby Hutcherson, Fred Hersch, Kenny Werner and
Steve Coleman. Zenón has been featured in publications such as The New York
Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, as well as gracing the
cover of DownBeat.
He has also toped the Rising Star Alto Sax category of the
DownBeat Critic's Poll on four different occasions. As a composer he has been
commissioned by SFJAZZ, The New York State Council for the Arts, Peak
Performances, Chamber Music America, The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and
many of his peers. Zenón has given hundreds of lectures and master classes at
institutions all over the world, and is a permanent faculty member at New
England Conservatory in Boston, MA. In 2011 he founded Caravana Cultural, a
program which presents free-of-charge jazz concerts in rural areas of Puerto
Rico.
In April
2008 Zenón received a fellowship from the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation. Later that year, he was one of 25 distinguished individuals chosen
to receive the coveted MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the "Genius
Grant."
Identities
are Changeable, his ninth recording as a leader, will be released November 4th,
2014.
For more
info: www.miguelzenon.com
Miguel
Zenón- Tour Dates / 2014
7/12: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Festival de
Jazz en Jalisco, Guadalajara, Mexico
8/1: Miguel Zenón Identities Big Band @
Newport Jazz Festival, Newport, RI
8/30: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ UW-Stevens
Point Festival, Stevens Point, WI
8/31: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Chicago Jazz
Festival, Chicago, IL
9/27: Miguel Zenón Quartet, Beantown Jazz
Festival, Boston, MA
11/2: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Princeton Jazz
Nights, Princeton, NJ
11/5: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ The
Atlas, Washington, DC
11/6: Miguel Zenón Quartet @
Outpost, Albuquerque, NM
11/7: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Clifton
Center, Louisville, KY
11/8-9: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Dazzle,
Denver, CO
11/10: Miguel Zenón Quartet @
Earshot Jazz, Seattle, WA
11/12: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Redwood
Jazz Alliance, Arcata, CA
11/14: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Jimmy
Mak's, Portland, OR
11/15: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Broad
Stage, Los Angeles, CA
11/18-23: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Village Vanguard, New York, NY
2015
2/12: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Bimhuis,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2/13: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Paradox, Tilbourg,
The Netherlands
2/14: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ AMR
Geneve, Geneva, Switzerland
2/18: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Pannonica,
Nantes, France
2/20: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ San
Severo, Italy
2/21: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Jazz
Club Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy
2/26: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Jazz
Club Singen, Singen, Germany
2/27: Miguel Zenón Quartet @
Birdland, Neuberg, Germany
3/5: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ JazzSchule Jazz
Club, Basel, Switzerland
3/20: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ + Video,
Hostos College, New York, NY
3/21: Miguel Zenón Quartet @
Montgomery Community College, Blue Bell,
PA
3/26-29: Miguel Zenón Quartet @ Jazz
Showcase, Chicago, IL
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